this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
85 points (86.3% liked)

Showerthoughts

30999 readers
947 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
    • If you feel strongly that you want politics back, please volunteer as a mod.
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

If we had an open source algorithm for Mastodon/Pixelfed that learned based on the words in the post and image/video we could have a Following + For You feed that showed you all the posts from people you follow and you could choose to see, say, 1 recommended For You post after every 3 posts from your Following feed. With the option to disable For You posts completely or tweak how often you see these.

Discovering new people to follow on mastodon/pixelfed isn’t great (hashtags are rarely used and make posts look ugly) so I still occasionally use twitter because I often discover new indie animators/gamedevs showing off their project making it really nice to browse the For You feed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Ginjutsu 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This and the way Mastodon handles likes/favorites are the biggest things holding them back right now, IMO. People don't want to bother with a social media they actually have to put in the work to curate themselves, hell the algorithm is one of the main reasons why TikTok is so successful. Also, by having favorites (which is... weird and confusing? Just call it "likes", you don't need to reinvent the wheel here). Not only do people get confused between favoriting something and bookmarking something, but since it's only counting the favorites from your instance, it makes it look like posts are getting barely any interaction, giving this "screaming into the void" feeling that will cause a lot of users to lose interest. The number of ~~likes~~ favorites needs to be cumulative across instances.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You’re 100% right. The people who are already on these platforms are the ones that don’t like any algorithm at all, so they tend to be combative about its implementation. I don’t think there will be mainstream appeal until it is easy and fun to use for the average person